Skydance Says Its Combined Studios Compete With Big Tech for Viewers' Time
Skydance CEO David Ellison told employees at the company's first town hall since its October acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery that the combined business competes for attention with some of the world's largest technology companies. Ellison framed the streaming side, which includes Paramount Plus and HBO Max, as a rival to those platforms for viewers' time, not only to other studios and networks.
On Skydance's earnings call on Monday, November 9, Ellison said the combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery broadcast, cable and streaming properties still trail YouTube in US television watch time, according to Nielsen. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, put YouTube's August share at a record 15.8 percent of viewing through US TV sets. Ellison also said Paramount Plus engagement had risen more than 20 percent since Skydance acquired Paramount last year.
Ellison has previously described a feed of short vertical videos, meaning brief clips formatted for a phone screen and played one after another, as “critical to our future” for Paramount's programming. That position now has company. Disney Plus, Paramount Plus, Netflix and HBO Max have each introduced swipeable feeds of short videos in their mobile apps over the past year, according to The Verge.
Disney's version, called Verts, launched in March. It lets viewers swipe through scenes, save titles, or jump straight into a movie or show. Disney said about 43 percent of its Disney Plus mobile users had interacted with Verts by October. In the ESPN app, Verts accounted for 65 percent of user-initiated short-form video starts, per Disney's own announcement.
Skydance's newsroom also lists a run of corporate actions in October and November. On October 6, the company announced that Ynon Kreiz, Laurene Powell Jobs and Bobby Kotick had joined its board as directors, and that Tony Blair had joined as an advisor. The same day, it announced the expiration, pricing terms and settlement of its exchange offers and tender offers. On October 14, it provided details on separate trading of its Class B shares and warrants. On November 9, it reported third-quarter 2026 financial results for Paramount Skydance and named Jeremy Latcham President and Chief Creative Officer of DC Studios. The newsroom also credits CBS with 14 Daytime Emmy Award wins, per Skydance's newsroom.
The figures in this story measure two different things, and it helps to keep them apart. The 15.8 percent YouTube share and the trailing position of the combined portfolio come from TV-set viewing, measured by Nielsen. The 20 percent engagement gain and Disney's 43 percent interaction rate come from in-app behavior on phones and tablets. Those are not the same measurement, and they are not directly comparable.
The broader context here is that streamers are borrowing a discovery mechanic, the way people find something new by browsing, that video platforms built their businesses on. They are attaching it to long-form catalogs designed around a different viewing pattern, one where a subscriber sits down to pick a film or series. A swipe feed can surface a scene and route the viewer to a full title, which is a plausible path to more hours per subscriber. Whether that holds at scale, and how much of Paramount Plus's reported engagement gain comes from the short-form layer rather than other product changes, will be the number to watch in the next few quarters.
The optimistic reading is that a short-form layer gives studio libraries a second front door, one that reaches viewers who would never open a full-length catalog cold. The cautious reading is that the same feed also sends them to a competitor's app the moment they swipe past a trailer. The companies involved have an obvious interest in the first reading.
